ANADARKO — Police found the mutilated body of the Rev. Carol Daniels in a "crucifix position” behind her church altar last Sunday, The Oklahoman learned from sources close to the investigation.

Sources confirmed that Daniels’ bloodied corpse appeared to have been left in the form of a cross with both arms outstretched to the sides. Sources also said investigators were disturbed by two other facts at the crime scene:

• The killer took Daniels’ clothes, perhaps to hide evidence or as a grisly trophy.

• The killer methodically took time to spray a dissolving chemical around the body in an apparent effort to destroy any DNA evidence.

Police found Daniels’ nude body at 12:09 p.m. after being notified by an elderly couple who found the Christ Holy Sanctified Church doors locked and the reverend’s vehicle parked in front. A medical examiner’s report obtained through an open records request showed that the killer inflicted deep, gaping wounds to the throat. The wounds nearly decapitated Daniels’ head, said Dr. William Manion, a forensic pathologist in Burlington County, N.J.

Severe lacerations were also found on her left breast, back, stomach and hands — the latter a sign that the 61-year-old Oklahoma City woman likely tried to fight her attacker.

Daniels’ hair was also burned.

Brent Turvey, a criminal profiler and private forensic scientist, said the evidence doesn’t appear to indicate a cold-blooded, serial killer.

"This is someone who felt they had been pushed way too far, or wronged by something she had done,” said Turvey, an Oklahoma City University adjunct professor. "They felt like they had to do these things. But this person was in a complete rage — a blind rage.”

Turvey contends a serial killer would have taken one piece of clothing as a trophy, not all of the clothing.

"The taking of the clothes was not done for a trophy, but was rather a practical act,” Turvey said. "The use of a dissolving spray was also a practical act.”

Turvey suspects the position of the body might have been coincidental.

"It’s either one of two things,” Turvey explained. "It could have been deliberate. They’re in a church; they put her in this position, perhaps a defiant way of saying, ‘Screw you and your God. Look how your God didn’t help you.’

"Or it was not at all deliberate, and her body just fell that way. It’s highly common to find a nude body lying on the ground with their arms outstretched like a cross. In fact, it happens all the time,” he said.

Homicide investigations in Anadarko don’t happen often. Daniels’ death is only the second homicide since January in this Caddo County town of 6,600 residents, and this one has left investigators puzzled.

"We have no suspects,” Capt. Dwaine Miller of the Anadarko Police Department said Thursday. "We have no idea who did this.”

Since Miller’s statement, all authorities have declined comment.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has now requested FBI behavioral science experts to help catch the killer.

"Calling in an FBI profiler is a move of utter last resort,” said Turvey, who has worked more than 800 homicides and 30 death penalty cases in 15 years. "That is more about PR than substance.”

Video surveillance retrieved from a nearby convenience store to the north shows Daniels driving up in front of the church on Broadway Street about 10 a.m. On the south side of the church is a back door that opens into a small alley. Investigators removed that back door for potential evidence, leaving a black, plywood board in its place.

The video has since been sent to a lab for enhancement, but it is unknown whether it will reveal anything relevant.

"We had two cameras,” Miller said earlier this week. "One showed Ms. Daniels’ car. The other camera points in the opposite direction. Had it been angled in a slightly different direction, it would have pointed to the back of that church and right at that alley.”

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